On Thu, Jan 11, 2001 at 12:21:37AM +0000, Philip Charles wrote: > 1. Should the dependency checking be disabled? (I would suggest yes).
Do you mean the checking in debian-cd? I hope not that you mean any checks in dpkg or dselect :) We certainly want to fix all dependency problems. Most often this is a problem of not up-to-date packages. Several people here are becoming Debian developers now (they are in progress), so they can upload recompilations and package updates soon. I am happy to provide some initial help how to do it correctly (there ae a couple of minor problems in dpkg build tools etc that require careful attention occasionally). > 2. What is the status of apt in relationship to the CD? apt is on the > exclusion list, yet people use it by forcing its installation. Should it > be removed from the exclusion list? Should it be in a directory of its > own, with possibly a simple installation script? apt is not available. I think 0.1.9 is in the ftp archive, but this is horrible broken. apt 0.3.19 doesn't compile out of the box, but I tested the current CVS version and this works very well. We can only hope that an apt 0.4.x is released soon. I can make a temporary package available on alpha.gnu.org (now that it is clear that the next official version really will work), so I might just be going to do that, and alpha is on the CD, IIRC. > 3. What should be in the exclusion list? exclude.txt will be on my > site www.copyleft.co.nz/exclude.txt in an hour or so. It will be able > to be accessed from the bottom of the index page. Comments please. As we are with two CDs already, I don't think anything should be excluded for technical reasons. We can save some space by excluding obviously silly packages which are not installable (let's say, everything that is not installable and of priority optional or extra). Something like that. The MOST important issue distribution wise is the following: dpkg needs to be able to treat Arhcitecture fields of linux-all, linux-any, hurd-all, hurd-any, so that linux specific packages can be marked and treated as such without listing all linux architectures. This field is also parsed by the ftp maintenance scripts and at some other places, so everywhere updates are needed. This feature is now actually feasible because of package pools. This is really most important. When this feature is available, we can start to file bug reports against such packages (makedev: linux-all, modutils: linux-any etc etc). This will clean up a lot of the mess. Marcus -- `Rhubarb is no Egyptian god.' Debian http://www.debian.org [EMAIL PROTECTED] Marcus Brinkmann GNU http://www.gnu.org [EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.marcus-brinkmann.de

